2010 State of Agile Development

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The fifth annual State of Agile Development survey was recently released by Versionone. It was conducted by Analysis.Net Research, and gathered responses from over 4,500 participants in 91 countries.

As one of the largest and longest-running agile development surveys, this serves as a pretty decent barometer for the community — but like any survey, the results should be taken with a grain of salt.

Agile tools

The Jira/GreenHopper combination is the fourth-most used agile tool in the survey with a 29% share, up from last year’s 24%.

After overtaking them last year, GreenHopper was leapfrogged by Versionone’s eponymous agile tool with 36% of respondents using it.

GreenHopper more than doubled the number of active customers since December of last year, despite this survey only showing a modest jump. That’s either very impressive growth by Versionone, or some creative surveying.

Excel and Microsoft Project both saw a decline since last year, perhaps signaling a trend towards more a sophisticated agile community.

Agile methodologies

Scrum is once again the most popular methodology by far, increasing from 50% to 58% over the past year.

Scrum/XP Hybrid saw a slight decrease from 24% to 17%, but the percentage of people practicing either a Scrum/XP Hybrid or pure Scrum stayed about the same (74% -> 75%), making Scrum a clear winner.

Our only question is, where’s Kanban? This year’s survey includes Scrumban as an option (3%), but no pure Kanban.